Tag: Stand your ground

The firearm is the most versatile self-defense tool that Man has ever developed. It allows the physically weak to equal and potentially best the strong. A 98 pound grandmother can drop a 250 pound thug with one squeeze of the trigger. There’s a make and model that will suit any user or application. But, there are times when you are unable, or not allowed, to have access to a firearm when you really, REALLY need one.

What got me thinking about this was a trip to Disneyland. Disney has really stepped up their game when it comes to security. They used to concentrate on purses and backpacks that guests were carrying into the park. This meant searching mostly women (Who generally aren’t a threat) and ignoring men (…and most violent perps are men!). I don’t know how many times I walked into the park with my knife and they didn’t notice because they were too busy looking in my wife’s purse. That’s no longer the case. Everyone gets looked at now! So now that the knife stays in the car, I started thinking about “what if” scenarios. (Yes, that’s the sort of thing I do while waiting in line at The Happiest Place On Earth. Doesn’t everyone?) I began to notice that there are potential weapons everywhere. These aren’t stand-off weapons like a gun, but neither is a knife.

A school or an office is no different. There are potential weapons all around you. You just have to start seeing things for what they can be made into rather than what they are now. A chair is a place to plant your butt; until you throw it at someone’s head.

Students (or office workers) are taught to lock doors and keep quiet during an active shooter attack. This is a good start. In a classroom, there are lots of heavy objects like tables and file cabinets. Use these to barricade the door. The chairs in the room make nice projectile weapons or clubs, should someone force the door open. (It’s not easy to aim a gun when there’s a chair flying at your face!) Pens and pencils make adequate stabbing instruments; especially when directed at an attacker’s eyes. Look around and think about how this or that can be used to inflict life threatening injuries. Work in teams. While one group of students is throwing things, others should be moving flank the attacker.

Sounds dangerous? It is. But at this point, what have you got to lose?! At the very least, you turn yourself into a moving target. Passivity won’t save your life. You may become someone else’s “meat shield”, but that’s about all sitting and cowering will do.

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We already know that liberals generally get the wrong “takeaway” from 1984. For them Winston Smith is the bad guy and BB is the hero. The mainstream media certainly takes its role as Minitrue seriously. But who knew that they also view Mike Judge’s Idiocracy with the same reverence.

There are many who have voiced suspicions that the deterioration of our education system is planned rather than mere entropy. Are these people tin-foil hat wearing crazies? Perhaps. But they may be correct tin-foil hat wearing crazies…

And as I’ve mentioned, we’ve all been quite content to demean government, drop civics and in general conspire to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry. The unawareness remains strong but compliance is obviously fading rapidly.

This is from a hacked email exchange between Clinton Campaign Chairman John Podesta and Bill Ivey, the former director of the National Endowment for the Arts. Ivey was appointed to that position by Bill Clinton and remains a “FOB“. It contains two interesting points. One is that Ivey, Podesta, and other liberals have indeed been conspiring “to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry”. (Proles, to use the newspeak term.) The second is that Ivey and Podest have discussed this before. This isn’t a one-off comment from Ivey; one where Podesta could claim he knows nothing of any conspiracies. The concept of furthering an “idiocracy” in America is something that neither man is unfamiliar with. But here, Ivey laments that they may not be the ones in charge once they’ve succeeded in dumbing down the population. They’re supposed to be the ones telling the rest of us that plants do not crave electrolytes and that we should stop pouring Brawndo on them.

The more general growth of an “unaware and compliant citizenry” is a tough nut to crack. But the problem of ignorant gun muggles isn’t. There’s something we can do about it; and it’s loads of fun too!

Take your gun muggle friends shooting.

Who doesn’t want an excuse to go to the range? Here’s your chance. Between now and Election day, take a friend to the range. Let them see that guns and gun owners aren’t the monsters they’ve lead to believe they are. This is your perfect chance to then let them know why gun control in general, and Prop. 63 in particular, is a really bad idea. Let them know how pointless these laws are. Let them know that rank-and-file police oppose gun control. Let them know that law enforcement has come out against Prop. 63. You can post on Facebook or Twitter all you like, but there’s no more powerful argument than letting your friends put a few downrange.

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Gun muggles may not be familiar with this saying: When seconds count, the police are only minutes away. It may, in fact, be many minutes depending on where you live in L.A.:

Police officers, as opposed to police administrators, are generally pro-gun. They see what goes horribly wrong when only the bad guy gets to use a gun. They also know all too well that their job usually doesn’t entail getting there in time to protect you. That leaves either showing up to take pictures of what’s left of you or taking your statement about why pulled a gun on (or shot) the bad guy. They prefer the latter. They have families too and were it their loved ones involved, they’d rather not see it go to that picture taking stage. They want their families to be armed and don’t begrudge you that same right.

A personal story (Yes, I realize that this is a data set with one and only one datum): We’ve only had to call 911 once here. While we didn’t expect the police to respond even in minutes, we were a little surprised when they finally did show up about 2 hours later. We’re in the West Valley division’s patrol area and we do see their cars quite often. Still, it’s more than a little unsettling to think that the response came hours rather than minutes later.

(This particular situation was one where I realized that the nutter on my front porch might actually be dangerous enough to warrant shooting; repeatedly. Fortunately, he cleared off when he realized that my wife really was on the phone with the police and not just doing her best Bob Newhart impression.)

Like this:

The government cannot “buy back” what it didn’t sell in the first place. It can only confiscate…

If you go and look at the comments on the video, you’ll see a lot of Aussie liberals with their knickers in a thorough twist. I don’t quite get it. They asked to be a nation of defenseless victims and now they’re bent about being called a nation of defenseless victims. Nevertheless, the state-run Australian Broadcasting Company posted this article quoting Australian gun owners saying that the video is an accurate depiction of what did happen in Oz.

Shooters Union Queensland vice president David Brown said the video was entirely accurate and that the 20-year-old information was still relevant.

“Factually the video is correct … it’s not the NRA that has drawn Australia into the conversation about gun ownership, it’s Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton,” Mr Brown said.

“Our union supports the laws for safe use and correct storage of firearms and the NRA in fact promotes that same message.”

Their government’s priorities remain at odds with the actual needs of its citizens and their safety.

[Brown] said Australian politicians should invest resources into tackling the root of problems spawning from organised crime gangs, mental health concerns and violence instead of “harassing farmers with gun licences”.

“There should be less focus on red tape for law-abiding firearm owners and more focus on crime gangs, drugs and giving help to people with mental illness rather than picking on farmers,” he said.

Like this:

Gun grabbers in the U.S. are a subset of a larger group of weapons prohibitionists. While most American anti-gun activists accept the idea of self defense with less-than-lethal weapons, their overseas cousins are not nearly so broadminded. And that fanaticism could have some unintended consequences.

As many of you probably know by now, a 17-year old Danish girl successfully used pepper spray to defend herself against a possible “Rapefugee” in Sønderborg, Denmark. She’s now facing a fine for doing so. The reason being that pepper spray and similar less-than-lethal weapons are illegal in Denmark. Thus the anti-weapon extremists have set up a system wherein victims of violent crime can be charged for defending themselves.

Note also what I call the anticooperative effect of law. Some people might react to this by not carrying pepper spray. But if a woman is carrying the pepper spray illegally and successfully fends off an attacker — or unsuccessfully tries to do so — will she go to the police so the attacker can be caught and his next attack prevented? Or will she keep quiet, since she doesn’t want to be prosecuted herself? (Note that pepper spray possession is apparently just punishable by a fine: not likely to greatly deter people from carrying, but likely enough to deter many pepper spray users from going to the police.)

I have to admit that my first reaction to the story was “Why did she go to the cops?!”. I doubt I’m the only American gun owner to have that reaction. It’s this nearly instinctive reaction that makes counting defensive gun uses in the U.S. so hard to do. Most of these involve simply showing a firearm to a potential attacker. The attacker, not wishing to be injured or killed, sensibly leaves. But after that, who in their right mind would call the cops to report themselves for what could be seen as “brandishing”? It’s this fear of prosecution for what is, in reality, a righteous act that causes so many gun owners to not cooperate with the police.

In a perfect world, the ideal reaction would be for the gun owner to report the incident so that, as Volokh points out above, “the attacker can be caught and his next attack prevented”. But, anti-gun extremists have created a legal climate that exposes the law abiding to criminal liability. The end result is that the criminal gets to walk away and try again with someone who isn’t armed.

Blaming inanimate objects for the actions of people is a pattern of behavior that self-righteous zealots have been using since prehistory. Here in the United States, the most successful expression of that insanity was the Temperance Movement that sprung up after the Civil War.

The Temperance Movement blamed alcohol for the actions of people. In that regard, [Moms Demand Action founder] Shannon Watts is little more than Carrie Nation, though Watts is much better compensated than the possibly mentally ill woman who was the driving force behind Prohibition.

It’s a fair question to ask: Are they nuts? Monomania certainly describes their obsession with firearms. They worry about what are really exceedingly rare events. Homicide in the US, with or without firearms, is largely limited to our criminal class. Gang bangers and drug dealers murder one another far more often than do Shannon Watts’ neighbors. In fact, her neighbors are far more likely to use firearms to stop violent crimes than criminals are to commit them.

Which make you wonder; Why is someone like Watts so obsessed? I get people like Gabby Giffords and her husband. Some liberal whackjob tried to kill her. Their response to that event may not be entirely reasonable (they’re still blaming the thing rather than the person), but it does have its own internal logic. Watts, on the other hand, went off the rails after Sandy Hook; an event that didn’t involve her.

One might say that she was simply moved by the loss of life. But if that’s the case, then where was her concern before that? During that same year, 2012, the city of Chicago had a “Sandy Hook” occur on its streets every 2 weeks. Where were Watts and here motherly minions then? Perhaps they were just as moved, but knew better than to raise a stink. After all, it’s not like they could claim that Chicago has a gun shop on every corner. Or that they city is awash in guns due to lax gun laws. Chicago is their kinda town. Criticizing Chicago’s gun laws would be… well… crazy.

It’s that last graph that’s most telling. Those who want less strict laws have more than tripled in number in the past year. This is despite a post Sandy Hook barrage of anti-gun reporting from the mainstream media.

As we’ve discussed before, there’s a danger in thinking that you and your friends are a reliable sampling of the population in general. And there’s a danger here of thinking “Ah-ha! We’ve won!” Support for gun control is soft and always has been. Likewise, this newfound opposition to stricter gun laws is probably also soft. One slick marketing campaign by the Left and this could all turn the other way.

There are several things we can do to keep these gains with our fellow Americans. We can take our non-shooting friends to the range. Even if this doesn’t result in their wanting to own firearms, you inoculate them against the most bigoted and extreme anti-gun rhetoric. You become the face of gun owners to them, not the caricature the media presents.

But the thing that will get you the most bang for your buck is to click this link and join the NRA. Other groups do not have an organization like the NRA to represent their interests. As a result, bad things happen to them and they can only respond after the fact rather than have a fighting chance of doing something to stop those bad things. Become a part of the 800 lb. gorilla.

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This sudden desire to repeal “Stand your ground” laws is confusing on two levels. The first is as a reaction to the Zimmerman trial; confusing since that trial had nothing to do with SYG. The second is that these proposals have no hope of passing. So what’s going on here?

This is another instance of anti-gun politicians toying with their supporters. They introduce these doomed laws to trick their supporters into thinking that something was done.

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Florida Congresswoman Frederica Wilson has a bill she would like to introduce in Congress. However, she seems to be forgetting a few things.

Rep. Wilson proposes that Congress pass a law repealing all of the “racist” Stand-your-ground laws across the US. Now most of you probably guessed the first thing that escaped her notice: The 10th Amendment. Sorry Rep. Wilson, but you don’t get to do things like that. The States are not departments of the Federal Government that Congress can issue edicts to. It doesn’t work that way.

Yup… You read that correctly. Ms. Wilson voted for the law that Jeb Bush signed into law in 2005. The same law, by the way, that George Zimmerman didn’t utilize in his trial. (One cannot “stand his ground” when pinned to the ground with no possibility of retreat.)